AND IT IS AWESOME! AND I WANT THE WORLD TO KNOW!
Welcome aboard. The Kool-aid is just down the hall and to the left.
Hey Randy,
I’m really new to game programming so I don’t have alot to compare with which to compare Unity3D.
Is this whole thing a matter of the emperor’s new clothes or do you think Unity3D is a good program?
What else is out there?
In the past, I developed custom 3d engines and toolsets for companies like EA, Disney Interactive, Sony, and many others.
So from my experienced perspective, I can safely say that Unity IS all that and a bag of chips. 8)
I love it.
Why is that CogCode? Can you give me a little more insight?
Unity is unique and “all that” because…
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It uses .net language for scripting (either Boo, Javascript or C#). Big one for me since I program in C# for a living. And a big one for beginners because learning to program for Unity is a valuable skill (learning to program in .net).
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The community is great (this forum) and the Unity employees are easy to contact and active on the forum. There is a lot of support.
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Unity makes making games easy. It is a great tool… of course, like any tool, you need to learn to use it before you can expect to get any really work done. But Unity is very easy compared to other game “tools”.
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Window, Mac, iPhone, Web, even the Wii… make a game and run it most everywhere.
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Ease of use: even as a new user, I rarely have to look at the manual except for the scripting API.
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Asset management: simply fantastic. My only complaint might be lack of some sort of built-in versioning, but that’s nit-picking considering how transparently Unity deals with my assets, and the fact that if I need it, I can use the use the Unity Asset Server.
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Runtime deployment: PC, Mac, iPhone, web-browser. Those are the major platforms I care about at the moment, and with some understandable exceptions on the iPhone, I get the identical application on all of the above.
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Pricing: Don’t tell UT, but $199 is a steal for what you get with Indie, and the additional $1300 for Pro is very reasonable. And once you own it, you can make and sell all the games that you want for any supported platform, with no additional runtime fees. SWEET!
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General purpose: I like it that Unity isn’t a “first person shooter” engine or a “3d platformer engine” or any one thing. Because of its design, it seems to be able to handle all TYPES of games with equal ease, so I don’t feel boxed into a corner with MY application design and development, whatever that may be.
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Documentation: This is a strong point with Unity. I can almost always find the answers I’m looking for, and it is well organized and easy to read.
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Integration: Using Unity means that I don’t have to keep jumping back and forth between multiple tools, such as a world editor, a coding environment, a scripting system, asset management, etc. etc. It’s all right there with Unity. Sure, you have to create your assets in other applications, and maybe you might prefer another script editor. But the creation of the game itself is all right at your fingertips, right there in Unity.
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.NET/Mono: This gets into the area of religious discussion, but I personally think that Mono is fantastic. It’s powerful, portable, and lets me easily build applications for multiple platforms, using a common framework, that JUST WORK. This seems to be the Unity team’s philosophy as well, so not only are we aligned philosophically and technologically, but my company’s .NET-based version of our AI system works in Unity with no changes whatsoever. That makes our use of Unity a “done-deal”.
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Applications: The proof is in the pudding, and some of the applications I have seen built with Unity are just fantastic. They are beautiful, fun to play, run smoothly, and are commercially viable. Not much more to ask for there.
I could really go on and on about the things I like in Unity, but I’ll simply give it the highest praise that I can think of: Unity is the game engine and toolset that I always WANTED to build.
Ok, so I am new to gaming and I’ve only falllen in love with 3 games in my entire life. List to me the top 3 games or apps you’ve seen built with Unity3D so that I may gague their quality.
Why wouldn’t you guys use Torque?
You can find a list of games produced with Unity by the link on the main page of the website. Take a cruise and try them yourself.
As for Torque, I have both the 2D and 3D apps and I have to say for a beginner in programming or game design this engine is /alot/ more user friendly.
A good part of it is the good documentation and the very helpful community and the support from Unity itself. When I do get to building my game (still going through the manual and tutorial) I have confidence if I need help it will be here for me.
For me, two main reason. The first reason is I have no real interested in working with core engine source code. If you use Torque/T3D and you are going to build say a RPG, from what I have been told at GG, you havea 100% chance of needing to modify the core engine code (moderate chances is what I was told).
The second reason is the editor. Since I have no need for the core engine source code I want an editor.IDE that is top notch and Torque (and screen shots of T3D) does not even compare.
As there are some restriction that you need to have the studio license that while are not deal breakers, they are annoying.
I have to disagree here. While I think the pricing of Unity itself is very nice, the price of the assets server is retardedly high compared to what is out there that works great for free. As far as I know, all teh file for engines like C4 and Torque would just fine with SVN. Unity seems to have made their file incompatible with SVN and then charges 500 per seat for an asset manager that from what I have read, is lacking in feature the SVN (which is free) has.
If the assets server cost 100, then I would have no issue buying it or if they sold the server for 500 and sold seat to access the server (or any unity server) for like 50 but it just seems like you are forced to buy a limited feature asset manager for 500 if you use Unity in a team for than 1 person. I would feel less ripped off if unity and the asset manager was build together and cost 2000 (because that way it would seem like the engine cost more than 1500 and 2000 for the engine alone is still not that bad).
I have to agree. This forum is incredibly active and generous. As for documentation, if I compare it to Autodesk’s Maya, which is as robust a 3d app and API as they come, Unity3D is seriously lacking. But that is no biggy.
This is going to seem like a very simplistic question but I don’t want to make any assumptions because I am new to this.
What is the purpose of asset management and can you get away without it?
You do need it. Lets say you have 3 programmers all working on different part of a single level, you need some sort of way to diff the files and merge all the difference and that is what the assets manager is for (or at least I hope that is what it does as theat is what SVN does).
Is the merging supposed to happen at runtime? I ask that because, given your answer, it seems that a Unity3D project/level (I don’t know which term is appropriate in this case) may reach a limit and must be parsed into separate blocks.
I disagree. If I have a big enough team that I start needing automated asset management tools, then I’m fine with paying the extra $499. That’s still a total of less than $2K per seat of Unity, fully blown.
Other asset management tools such as Alienbrain use the exact same model, where the server is free, and you pay for seats of the client.
Maybe it’s just my background, but I’m used to this model and fee structure.
I have been using Unity also for about a week now, most of it has been reading reference materials, watching videos, and doing tutorials.
I was using another product called DX Studio before. I was quite a fan of it for a long time, 2-3 years. I don’t want to say anything bad about DX Studio, they are good people. 
Unity though. It is a dream come true. 
Everything is nice and object oriented, reusable scripts, great editor UI functionality, and lots of documentation on the API. It is seriously a breath of fresh air, and making games is fun again.
@verbatimline and bunzaga,
One important thing for me with Unity is the fact that their founders, team/engineers get involved with this forum daily. Over recent weeks we had a very lengthy discussion regarding Unity iPhone direction/fixes/features. UT reacted to this discussion and changed their own policy to now avail product roadmaps then went further to post a user voting system to find what features are most important to users moving forward.
Owning a small business I find UT’s licensing great for me… one licence gives you two installs Mac+Mac or Mac+PC or PC+PC (not used at same time) which is great if you travel to have a copy on your notebook. Another biggy is they do not charge for dot upgrades and include new features in them.
I have developed games on Torque and most recently XNA (and rolled quite a bit of my own on DirectX and OpenGL), and I would say it is much more than new clothes. That’s not to say the engine/framework is perfect, but in the short while I have been developing on it, I have been very impressed.
Try Gamestudio!